I've been working on refining my workflow for making blades - I figured while I was at it, I may as well try to practice sculpting ornate/fine details in Zbrush.

I found the idea of a gilded machete to be a weirdly interesting concept - most of the time, a machete is seen as a down-and-dirty working tool (y'know, for the average farmer, explorer, or horror movie slasher). So making it into something that would look comfortable in the hands of a royal guard or wealthy aristocrat struck me as a fun subversion.

Post-Mortem Lesson:Trying to free-wheel a ZBrush sculpt without concept art is definitely not the brightest idea. It slows production down by a considerable amount. I'm pretty sure that if I had taken all of 10-15 minutes to sketch out the overall design beforehand, it probably would have shaved off about an hour and a half of sculpt time on the ridge details.